John Willinsky is Khosla Family Professor of Education at Stanford University and sometime professor at the University of British Columbia. He is the director of the Public Knowledge Project at Stanford, UBC, and SFU, which has been working for a decade on improving the scholarly and public quality of research through the development of open source platforms for journals and a research program studying the impact of this increased access to research on professionals and the public, as well as on the global dimensions of the academic community. Much of his work, including his book, The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship (MIT Press, 2006), as well as the software for journals and conferences, is freely available on the project's website (http://pkp.sfu.ca).

Dr. Conlon is Associate Director and Chief Operating Officer of the University of Florida Clinical and Translational Science Institute, Director of Biomedical Informatics, UF College of Medicine, and Principal Investigator of the NIH project “VIVO: Enabling National Networking of Scientists.” His responsibilities include development of academic biomedical informatics, expansion and integration of research and clinical information resources and strategic planning for academic health and university research.  As PI of the VIVO project, Dr. Conlon leads a team of 120 investigators at seven schools in the development, implementation and advancement of an open source, semantic web application for research discovery.  Previously Dr.

Greg is the Founder and CEO of Anianet, a professional network connecting Chinese scholars to their western peers. In addition to these responsibilities, Greg serves as a consultant to publishers, libraries, universities, and information providers as owner of ScholarNext. ScholarNext clients include SPARC, Microsoft, and Annual Reviews.  He has been President of The Berkeley Electronic Press, as well as Director of Product Marketing for EndNote. Greg writes a regular column in Against the Grain covering emerging developments in the field of scholarly communication. He has been as an invited speaker at dozens of conferences, including the American Library Association, the Society for Scholarly Publishing, the Association of Professional and Learned Society Publishers, and Online Information UK.

Alma Swan is a consultant working in the field of scholarly communication. She is a director of Key Perspectives Ltd and holds honorary academic positions in the University of Southampton School of Electronics & Computer Science and the University of Warwick Business School. Alma is Convenor for Enabling Open Scholarship, the global organisation of universities promoting the principles of open scholarship in the academic community.

Kirsta Stapelfeldt, (MA, MLIS) is the Repository Manager at the University of Prince Edward Island and manager of UPEI's Islandora project. Through the Robertson Library's Virtual Research Environment Service (VRE service), librarians and developers at UPEI are supporting over 140 repository projects. UPEI's repositories and research environments are developed using the highly-flexible Islandora open-source software stack. Islandora empowers researchers to collaborate with off-site colleagues, store and manipulate data sets, and publish research findings, and is used to house UPEI's local digitization projects. Islandora and the VRE service were founded by University Librarian Mark Leggott, and have inspired innovation in funding and management, transforming the role of librarians and the library at UPEI.

Dr. Joel Thierstein is Associate Provost at Rice University and Executive Director of Connexions. Prior to coming to Rice, Dr. Thierstein served as an Associate Professor and Director of New Media Communications at Oregon State University. He also served as a professor at Baylor University, Purdue University Calumet, and Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville. Dr. Thierstein served as a visiting professor of Communications Law at Syracuse University.

Dr. Thierstein has nearly 10 years of media experience. He has worked in radio, television, cable television, and newspaper. Dr. Thierstein has also worked with many companies and associations including Sony, the Pro-MPEG Consortium, and the National Association of Broadcasters.

Rachel L. Frick is the Director of the Digital Library Federation Program at the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR/DLF). Prior to her work at CLIR, she was the Senior Program Officer for the National Leadership Grants Program for Libraries at the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Ms. Frick’s library experiences ranged from being the Director of Bibliographic and Digital Services at the University of Richmond to a regional sales manager for the Faxon Company, with a variety of library positions in between. She holds an M.S.L.S. degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a B.A. in English literature from Guilford College.